Hello. Welcome to our wonderful world of website and graphic design. I thought I would open with the story of our name.

If you’ve ever been to a table quiz, you’ll know the distress, rage, uncertainty and anxiety associated with picking a name. Sometimes there’s a prize for best name, so even if your useless teammates don’t know Jimi Hendrix was a member of Club 27, you might still walk away with that coveted box of Roses chocolates. You argue, you rack your brains trying to think of other table quizzes you’ve been at where teams had brilliant names, you settle on “Team 8” and live with the shame. You don’t win any chocolates and Anne’s brother Dave has never heard of Jimi Hendrix.

So imagine that… Times a thousand.

The factors we considered were: Is it taken? Are we going to give ourselves grief on Google (i.e. calling yourselves ‘Process’, or ‘Memory’ or ‘Chair’)? Is it offensive in a way we haven’t thought of? Has it got anything to do with web design? Do we hate it? Do other people hate it? Do we actually like it?

Fractals are beautiful examples of an indefinite repeating pattern. They scale forever (like the best websites, or if not forever, at least onto laptop, phone and tablet.). They have a mesmerising symmetry. They embody the best principles of design. It’s also just a nice word, that miraculously wasn’t taken. We “fractalise” things, by making them beautiful and scaleable.

It met all the criteria, and now it is our name.

I learned about fractals in college, where we had an assignment to generate a Mandelbrot Set in Matlab. Fortunately there was Matlab code on the Wikipedia entry so we all got top marks. That appears to be gone now, but if you’re a lazy 4th year engineer in need of some help I could probably dig it out.

Anthea